Belt buckles, particularly the type sometimes referred to as a western buckle, usually incorporate a decorative facing immediately visible to observers. Such facings include fanciful designs, initials, logos, and sometimes three-dimensional pictorial representations. The use of such belt buckles for advertising purposes has become popular, and it is not uncommon to see belt buckles having familiar logos representing various manufacturers such as truck and automobile manufacturers, beer brands, or other such highly visible and publicized product logos.
The utilization of customized facings on belt buckles usually requires expensive manufacturing processes which therefore increase the cost of such buckles. It is therefore highly unusual for such buckles incorporating complex logos to be seen as promotional items that can be dispensed at a nominal price or perhaps even given away. Indeed, logos of popular brands of merchandise are frequently made available at a relatively high purchase price and may even become a second profitable market in and of themselves.
For those organizations that would like to avail themselves of the advertising benefits of customized belt buckles it is nearly impossible to command a sufficient price for the belt buckles to make it economically feasible to attempt to advertise in this manner.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a belt buckle construction that permits the incorporation of a decorative face at low cost.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a belt buckle construction that may be produced at very low cost while nevertheless permitting customized pictorial facings such as logos and the like.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a belt buckle having a decorative face that may be produced very inexpensively and without the need for complex and expensive machinery to thereby make small batch processing of such belt buckles economically feasible.